Kellan kept moving.
The bridges didn't trust him, and he didn't trust them back. Every stone felt slick, every gap wider than it should be. His cut stung each time his sleeve brushed it. He tore a strip from the hem of his shirt and wrapped the forearm tight. It wasn't clean, but it kept the blood where it belonged.
The city sprawled around him in gray and black. Rooftops sloped like waves. Arches rose and fell. The rain never sped up, never slowed down—just hung there, patient, as if time itself was tired.
He took a narrow path across a sagging balcony. The rail was snapped in two places. Moss furred the stone. Below, the water pressed against drowned windows with a soft, steady hiss. It would be easy to fall. It would be easier not to think about it.
He kept his eyes forward.
A faint pulse glowed in the distance under the palace dome. It wasn't bright enough to light anything, only enough to mark a direction. He focused on that, like a lighthouse seen through fog.
On the next roof, he found a section of broken masonry—a length of carved stone that had snapped loose from a parapet. He hefted it. Too heavy. He tried again and found a shorter piece, about as long as his forearm, one end broken to a nasty point. It would do.
"Hello, stick," he muttered. "You're hired."
The joke fell flat in the air, swallowed by damp.
He crossed to a higher roof and paused to scan the water. Something moved below the surface—not fast, not slow, just steady. He watched until it vanished beneath a darker patch and didn't come back.
Yeah. Stay down there.
He set off again, angling toward a squat tower ahead. It had narrow slits instead of windows and a conical roof, like a bell tower swallowed by a bigger building. A narrow footbridge linked it to the roof he stood on. The stones looked better here—less broken, less slick. That made him suspicious.
Halfway across, he heard it: a soft sound like fabric tearing underwater.
He stopped.
The underside of the bridge was a shadowed arch. In that darkness, something shifted. He didn't look long. He kept his eyes moving and stepped lightly, placing his feet where the stones were least wet.
The sound followed him—slow, almost curious.
He made it to the tower's ledge and climbed over. The roof here was flat. A low hatch stood in the center, iron-banded wood swollen with damp. Beside it, a rope ran through a narrow slot and down into darkness.
A bell rope.
Kellan crouched, listening. No footsteps inside. No breath. The city breathed, but this place was still.
He tugged the rope very gently. Something heavy shifted below. The rope gave a little and then caught. He let it go.
Not yet.
He circled the roof's edge. From here he could see more rooftops toward the palace. The path was a jagged line of bridges and terraces. Beyond them, the dome glowed again. The pulse wasn't random. It kept time with the muffled bell he'd heard earlier.
He leaned on the parapet. The stone was cold through his sleeve.
"You're the heart," he said under his breath. "Or you're pretending to be."
A stone statue watched from the next building—the robed kind he'd seen before, hands covering its face. He'd thought they were all the same. Up close, this one wasn't. The fingers were spread slightly, as if whoever carved it had meant for the statue to be peeking between them.
He didn't like that.
He looked away and pretended the statue wasn't there.
The hatch creaked.
Kellan spun, bringing the broken stone up out of reflex.
The hatch hadn't opened. It had settled deeper into swollen wood as the tower shifted under his weight.
"Relax," he told himself. "Paranoid gets to live. Panicked gets to drown."
He knelt by the hatch and pressed his ear to the damp wood. Nothing but the faint thrum of rain-muddled silence. He worked his fingers under the iron ring and pulled. The hatch lifted a few centimeters and stuck. He pulled harder. It rose with a suck of wet air and a smell like coins.
Darkness gaped below.
He waited for movement. None came.
The first rung of the ladder glistened with condensation. He tested it. Solid enough. He climbed down three steps and let his eyes adjust.
The tower's interior was a narrow shaft. The bell hung above him in the gloom—big, simple, cast with a ring of symbols around its mouth. He couldn't read them. The rope ran from the clapper down past him to a wooden wheel fixed to the wall. It looked like it had been built for one person to ring with effort, or many to ring in a hurry.
On the wall opposite the wheel, someone had scratched lines into the plaster. Not words. Tallies.
Kellan stared. The marks clustered in groups of seven, then reset. A count. Days? Alarms? Lives?
He swallowed.
He climbed down farther until he reached a small platform with a narrow slit of a window. Through it he could see a slice of the drowned street below—an alley turned canal. The water there was calmer. Something pale floated just under the surface, snagged on a submerged doorway.
He watched until it drifted deeper into shadow and vanished.
Enough.
He climbed back up to the roof and pulled the hatch closed. The iron ring thumped against the wood.
Back on the parapet, the city looked the same—gray, drowned, patient. He wished it would change. Even a gust of wind would have helped, just to prove the world could still move fast if it wanted to.
He touched his forearm. The cut had stopped bleeding. The skin around it felt hot. He flexed his hand. No numbness yet. Good. He tightened the torn cloth again and pushed on.
The next bridge sloped downward to a building with a wide, shallow dome. Its tiles were arranged in concentric circles, a slick target for rain. He crossed it with short steps, keeping his weight low. Halfway over, his foot skidded. He dropped to a knee and caught himself on the pointed stone. The sound it made against tile—sharp, gritty—carried farther than it should have.
Something answered. A faint tapping from below, then another farther off, like knuckles rapping on drowned doors.
"Don't love that," he said softly.
He hurried the rest of the way and eased onto a terrace with a crumbling balustrade. A rusted iron gate lay twisted on the tiles. Behind it, an archway opened into darkness.
Inside, the floor was dry. He stepped through and let his eyes adjust. The room had been some kind of hall. A fresco covered the far wall—cracked, flaked, but still legible in parts. It showed a city in colors: blue for water, gold for roofs, white for bridges. At the center, a great crystal pulsed beneath a domed palace. Around it, tiny figures lifted hands as if in prayer.
A second scene took up the other half of the wall. The same city. The crystal shattered. Water swallowing streets while people fled across rooftops.
Between the two scenes, a robed figure stood facing the crystal, one hand on her chest. The painter hadn't given her a face. Just light.
Kellan stood there a long time.
"Okay," he whispered. "So you weren't subtle."
The fresco didn't tell him everything. It told him enough to keep going.
He looked for anything useful. The hall had been stripped by time and water. A few broken benches clung to one side, their wood warped and split. He tested a leg and broke it free. It fit his hand better than the stone did. He kept both.
A sound drifted in from outside—a distant note, low and heavy. The same bell as before. It rolled through the halls like a breath.
He stepped back onto the terrace.
The statue across the way had moved.
He froze. No. Not moved. He'd moved, and now he could see it from a different angle. Its fingers were still splayed over its face. But there was space between them. Enough for eyes.
"Yeah," Kellan said under his breath. "I see you too."
He didn't stare. He looked past it and picked his next path.
The terrace ended at a broken stair. It descended to a balcony just skimming the water's surface. A bridge had once connected that balcony to a higher roof, but the middle portion had collapsed, leaving a gap a little wider than a long stride. The only other option would carry him around three extra buildings, back toward where he'd heard the tapping.
He eyed the jump. The tiles on the far side were intact. If he slipped, the water was right there, black and waiting.
He backed up to the far wall, ran, and leapt.
His foot hit the edge. He slid. The world tilted—sky, dome, water. He threw his weight forward and crashed onto his shoulder. Tile scraped skin. The pointed stone clattered and almost skidded off the roof.
He lay there a second, face pressed to cold ceramic.
"I hate you," he told the city. "I really do."
The palace light pulsed again.
He got up slowly and retrieved the stone. The bench leg felt better in his hands. He tested its weight, swung it once, and winced as the motion tugged his forearm.
Keep moving.
At the next roof, he found a narrow lane of broken chimneys that formed a sort of cover. He took it, crouching low as he went. Ahead, a cluster of drowned stood at the far end of a roof, motionless. He ducked behind a chimney and watched.
They weren't patrolling. They were listening.
He picked up a loose tile and tossed it hard to the opposite side of the building. It clattered, skipped, and fell into the water with a soft plunk. The drowned turned as one and shuffled toward the sound, heads tilted, water streaming from their mouths.
Kellan slipped past the gap they left and didn't breathe until he was on the next roof over.
He wanted to laugh. It came out as a shaky exhale.
"Still got it," he said, and didn't think about what it was.
The path opened onto a long bridge with no rails at all. At its midpoint, a marble plinth rose waist-high. Another statue stood upon it, robed, fingers parted just a little.
He walked without looking directly at it. The rain gathered on the bridge stones in beaded sheets. His boots—he wished he had boots—his feet slid once, twice. He didn't speed up. He didn't slow down. He kept the bench leg in his dominant hand and the pointed stone in the other.
Halfway across, something scraped under the bridge.
He didn't run. He finished crossing and stepped onto the next roof. Only then did he look back.
Under the arch of the bridge, a pale shape clung to the underside like a bat. Its limbs were too long. Its head swiveled toward him without moving the body. It didn't come out. It just watched from shadow.
"Stay there," he whispered. "Please."
He kept moving toward the dome that pulsed like a tired heart.
The bell sounded again, closer this time. The note shivered through stone and water and into him. Not a call to prayer. A warning.
He didn't know for whom.
By the time he reached the last row of roofs before the palace ring, the light under the dome was strong enough to leave a faint glow on wet tile. The buildings here were larger, their roofs flatter, with wide platforms that might once have held gardens. Shapes lay across them—heaps of sodden fabric, collapsed trellises, a metal frame twisted into a cage by some old heat.
Kellan stopped.
Some of the heaps were breathing.
He crouched behind a broken planter and watched the nearest bundle. Water leaked from it steadily. The shape inside shifted and sighed. Fingers—human fingers—pushed the fabric up and then fell still again.
Not fabric. Fins. A web of something like wet silk stretched over bone.
The bundle lifted and a face turned toward the sky. A woman's face, pale and smooth, hair slicked to her skull. Her eyes opened.
They were not human.
Kellan went still as stone.
The siren stared past him, unseeing, and began to hum.
The sound stroked the air like a hand. It slid along his nerves, warm and sad and tempting. A good memory, he thought without wanting to. The kind you'd trade teeth to live in a little longer.
He grabbed the bench leg until splinters bit his palm and looked down at the tile. He listened to his own breath and not the song. He counted. One. Two. Three. Four.
The hum drifted toward the water and faded.
Kellan waited another ten counts and then ten more. Only then did he move. He put the planter between himself and the siren and picked his way toward a ruined arch that would take him around the garden roofs.
He could still feel the song on his skin. He didn't like how easy it had been to want it.
"Hope and Desire," he said very quietly. "Right."
No answer came.
------
The garden roofs thinned into a ring of bigger buildings—broad, flat, and close to the palace island. The water pressed right up to their edges. Bridges here were heavier, almost ceremonial, carved with patterns that the flood had half-eaten away.
Kellan kept to shadow. The bench leg rode in his right hand, the pointed stone in his left. He moved from chimney to broken arch, counting steps, testing tiles with his toes before trusting them with weight.
The bell tolled again. Closer. The note sank into the stone under his feet.
He paused at the mouth of a collapsed colonnade. Beyond it, an arched bridge leapt to the palace ring. Two statues stood on plinths at the near end—robed, fingers spread just enough for peeking.
"Yeah," he whispered. "No."
He didn't take the bridge. He cut left along a parapet and found an open arcade—tall windows with no glass, facing a drowned courtyard. Inside, the floor rose in shallow steps around a central space. Shelves leaned against the walls, their wood swollen and split. Books lay in drifts like dead fish.
An archive.
Kellan slipped inside. The air was colder. It smelled like wet paper and iron.
Most of the shelves had collapsed. He stepped over a heap of rotting leather and kicked something that rang faintly. A metal clasp. One book near the back had been wrapped in oilcloth and tied shut with a strip of dark ribbon. Someone had put it high, on a stone ledge above the rest.
He climbed the steps, tested the ledge with his palm, and reached up. The package came away sticky with damp, but intact.
He carried it to a patch of drier floor near the windows and crouched. The knot had glued itself to the cloth. He worked it loose with numb fingers and peeled the oilcloth back.
A ledger sat inside, bound with tarnished brass. A simple name had been tooled into the cover in faded gilt: MARA.
He opened it very carefully.
Some pages were ruined to pulp. Others had survived where the oilcloth had done its job. The handwriting was tight and neat, letters angled like a disciplined hand that had gone a little tired. He skimmed the first lines he could read.
'We were warned. Not by gods. By numbers. The water rose in sums, not in storms.
He flipped a page with the tip of the stone.
They said the Heart would hold as long as we fed it faith and salt. We gave both. We gave more.'
Another page.
'There is a crack in the dome. We pretend not to see it. We ring the bell. No one answers but the bell.'
Kellan swallowed. The bell rope in the tower. The tallies.
He read on.
'The Princess has not left the Palace in three days. The priests have bled their hands to make the wards shine. The water presses and the floor creaks and still the Heart beats. We are not saved.'
Kellan let out a slow breath he hadn't meant to hold.
He turned another page. The ink here had run more, but he made out enough.
'A delegation crossed the bridge at dawn. Six of them. The Watchers turned their heads but did not move. The sirens climbed the garden walls and sang without voice. She sent them back with bread and with nothing else.
She. The Princess. The palace.'
He kept going.
'If anyone finds this when I am not here, know this: the dome's light is not a sun. It is a wound. The Heart beats because it is bleeding.'
'Below it, a date he could not read. Then a cramped note:
I have not rung today. I will not. Let the bell be honest.'
A scraping sound came from the far corner of the hall.
Kellan shut the ledger without slamming it, slid it under his arm, and stood. He edged to the nearest window slit and looked out.
The courtyard had filled to the sill. The surface lay inches below his boots, black, mirrorless. A pale shape glided there, just under the skin of the water—too long to be a person, too thin to be a fish.
It passed and was gone. The scraping stopped. He waited another ten counts, then ten more, then breathed again.
He crouched and reopened the ledger on a different page.
'They have asked us to call her by a title I will not write. I remember the day she burned the old name from the records and said, What I am now is for the city, not for you. We clapped. It felt like faith.'
Another line, later:
'When the crack widened, the old men whispered the word sacrifice. She said, Not that way.'
Then:
'The choice was made at night. I think this because the water rose quietly. Doors sighed. Everyone's dreams smelled of salt.'
Kellan blinked at the page until the letters steadied.
A small sketch took up the next leaf: not a face, just a dome with a hairline fracture and water drawn as a thousand tiny lines pressing up from below. In the margin: 'If the Heart breaks, the city will live for a little while as it drowns.'
He turned to the final section that had survived.
'We are told to ring if help comes. We are told to believe. I have rung. The rope burned my hand. No one came. Faith does not patch glass.'
At the very bottom, ink pressed deep as if the hand had been shaking:
'She is going to flood us. She says it will stop the thing in the deep from waking. She says it is mercy. I am leaving this here because mercy needs witnesses.'
Kellan stared at the words until the page blurred. He could hear the garden water sighing against stone. He could hear his breath and the ledger's old leather creaking and beneath it all the bell—distance punched through walls.
"Okay," he said quietly. "That's… something."
Not proof the heart was a person. Not yet. But close. Close enough to explain the dome, the light, the way the city's breath felt like someone's.
He closed the ledger and wrapped it back in the oilcloth as best he could. He tucked it under his arm and stood.
Something thumped the outer wall.
He froze. The sound wasn't a knock. It was the dull, sodden noise of a soaked body leaning its weight where it shouldn't.
He moved to the far window and slid a glance down.
Drowned had gathered in the courtyard, faces upturned toward the windows, mouths open like wells. Water spilled from them without stopping. Their heads twitched this way and that as if listening for his breath.
One of them stepped onto a submerged bench and reached for the sill where his hand had been a moment before.
Kellan pulled back and pressed his spine to the cold stone.
Think.
He scanned the hall. The far wall held a door warped shut. The near side opened back onto the arcade. To the right, a short corridor climbed into darkness. He took the corridor.
The steps were shallow and slick, built for fine shoes, not bare feet. He climbed anyway, counting them to keep his breathing quiet. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty. At the top, the corridor opened into a narrow gallery that circled the outer wall. Small windows looked out over the drowned streets. From here, the palace dome filled half the sky.
A table sat near one window. On it, a small coffer of black wood lay with its lid open. Inside, wrapped in oilskin, were four bone tubes capped with bronze. Message cylinders.
Kellan checked them. Three were empty. The fourth held a thin scroll of parchment. He eased it out.
The hand was the same as the ledger's, but smaller, finer, written with a sharper nib.
'To the one who rings when no one answers. We heard. We could not cross. The Watchers turned their faces and we turned back. The Princess did not come. The dome light is wrong. It pulses like a wound. If you read this, leave the archives and climb. The higher paths are safer. Do not touch the water. If you reach the palace, do not beg. Ask her why.'
Below it, a mark that might have been a name or a sigil. A loop, a line, a dot.
Kellan rolled the parchment back into its tube and slid it into the ledger's oilcloth. He tucked both inside his shirt, against his ribs, where they warmed to his skin.
He went back to the gallery window and looked down.
The drowned in the courtyard had multiplied. They clustered below the archive windows, shoulders touching, heads tilted. One by one, they opened their mouths and let the water pour. The surface rose a finger's width.
"Right," he whispered. "Higher, then."
He left the gallery and took a different stair down to the opposite side of the hall. It opened onto a narrow balcony that jumped to the neighboring roof across a short gap. The bridge there had fallen, but a thick beam remained, wedged between the two ledges like a last, desperate fix.
He tested it with his foot. It held.
He crossed in a crouch, keeping his weight low, eyes on his hands. The beam flexed once and then settled. On the far side, he rolled into shadow and listened.
Nothing followed. The drowned didn't climb well unless they had help.
He peeked back into the archive. Water already lapped at the lowest step. The ledger had talked about quiet flooding. He was watching it happen, inch by patient inch.
He turned away and set his eyes on the palace ring.
The dome pulsed again. A breath. A heartbeat. A wound. The bell answered with a low note that shuddered through his bones.
Ask her why, the scroll had said.
"Yeah," Kellan said. "I plan to."
He moved along the roofline toward the last set of bridges.
Behind him, the city let out a slow, almost human sigh.